Unintentional Truth

“The plaintiffs in the Trump University case, filed in 2010, accuse him and the now-defunct school of defrauding people who paid as much as $35,000 for real estate advice. Mr. Trump said Friday that Trump University received ‘mostly unbelievable reviews’ from its 10,000 students.” — “Judge Unseals Trump University Documents,” Wall Street Journal online, May 31, 2016.

We Are All Victims Now

On April 30 a 19-year-old Arizona man was arrested on 70 criminal charges after it was discovered that, in a picture taken last August of his high-school football team, the tip of his penis was protruding from the top of his pants. Although the photo, joke included, appeared in his high school yearbook and in programs distributed at sports events, it took all this time for someone to notice the little flash of penis. Nevertheless, “Mesa [Arizona] police booked Osborn [that’s the kid] on one count of furnishing obscene material to minors, a felony, and 69 counts of indecent exposure. Ten faculty members and 59 students were present when Osborn exposed himself and are considered victims, according to police and court documents.”

This happened in a country in which Prince, a musician who appeared on stage and in videos with his naked butt protruding from his costume, while dancers mimicked sex acts, was mourned as a national hero after his death from an apparent drug overdose; a country in which the most profitable music lyrics are so obscene and violent that journals not labeled “adult” never quote them; a country in which, over two decades ago, the Surgeon General suggested that young people be taught to masturbate; a country in which hundreds of thousands of young women are exploited as “baby mamas” by irresponsible men; a country in which major corporations boycott a state because it does not stipulate that people can enter any restroom that matches their own idea of their gender; a country in which . . . Add your own examples. This is the country in which 70 people became sexual victims without even knowing that anything happened to them.

By the way, the charges against the young man have now been dropped. Therewas a public outcry, thank God. Now I hope we can all focus our attention on our national schizophrenia about sex.

About this Author

Stephen Cox is editor of Liberty, and a professor of literature at the University of California San Diego. His recent books include The Big House: Image and Reality of the American Prison and American Christianity: The Continuing Revolution. Newly published is Culture and Liberty, a selection of works by Isabel Paterson.

Can This Be Real?

Like millions of other people, I’m used to regarding the current presidential campaign as something I see on television — a long-running show that isn’t nearly as good as the original Law and Order, and is much farther removed from reality.

But now I’m convinced that this thing is real. It isn’t just a drama about Martians invading the earth. The Martians are actually here. Beings called Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton will actually be nominated for the highest office in the secular world.

I have only some scattered thoughts to offer.

1. If the establishment “conservatives” had done what they promised to do, and could have done, instead of giving veto power to Harry Reid and every pressure group in the country, this never would have happened.

2. If the establishment “liberals” thought that funding universities to teach people nonsense would not produce a perennial crop of agitators, they were stupider than I thought. But yes, they were stupider than I thought. You can see this in the amazement on Hillary’s face whenever somebody hits her with a slogan that comes right out of Democratic Party 101.

If Donald and Hillary were people of responsible character, they would not be the presumptive nominees for president of the United States.

3. It has been said that if you subsidize something, you get more of it. Both parties have spent the past generation subsidizing the arrogance of the rich, the illusions of the poor, and the ignorance of everyone. Can you imagine Donald Trump reading a book? Can you imagine Hillary Clinton reading a book, even a book she “wrote”? Now imagine one of these illiterates in the seat of Adams and Jefferson.

4. If you went for personal advice to Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, what do you think you’d hear? Can you think of anyone, not criminally insane, who would give you more spiritually debilitating counsel?

5. Does character count? Yes it does, but in politics it often counts in ways we wouldn’t like it to count. If Donald and Hillary were people of responsible character, they would not be the presumptive nominees for president of the United States.

6. Some libertarians believe that this amusement park election will expose the evils of American politics. I’m sure they’re right. In fact, it has already done so. The question is, what condition will we be in when we stumble off the roller coaster at the end of this ride?

Power or Persuasion

My title may suggest a Jane Austen novel, but I have something totally different in mind. I write about the politics not of amour, but of state. There isn’t much love in our politics, and there probably never has been. But the bigger and more oppressive the government becomes, the smaller the space left in our society for love.

When I speak to fellow libertarians of the Republican and Democratic parties as “major,” and the Libertarian as “minor,” the sparks fly. They’re insulted because they think I’m suggesting that the Libertarian Party is less important. Since that’s not what I mean, I’ve tried to find more accurate terms. The Democrats and the GOP are the parties of power, but the Libertarians are the party of persuasion.

These terms respond to the fact that the two types of political parties have different functions. If we remember what that difference is, we may keep a clearer picture of the goals we can accomplish. Not only that, but we’ll likely spare ourselves a lot of frustration.

The bigger and more oppressive the government becomes, the smaller the space left in our society for love.

Devotees of the power game can’t understand us, because they don’t understand the importance of persuasion. No truly free society can exist without it. If coercion and aggression are everything, then only power matters. People who think like that will always belong to parties of power.

Libertarians are believers in persuasion. We measure our political success not by “winning,” but by convincing. It took me some time to make my peace with that concept, but when people tell me that my candidate has no chance of winning an election, in that condescending tone they always use, it no longer makes me gnash my teeth. I simply measure success by a different yardstick.

Even if we’re not capital-L people, if we are lovers of liberty we are people of persuasion. And a growing segment of the public is being persuaded. We have every reason to hope that the number will continue to grow. Power players will go right on telling us what losers we are because we can never “win.” But the game is changing.

The success of anti-establishment candidates in the power party races has plunged the power players into gloom. They think the voters are having yet another temper tantrum, and are lecturing us all on the unsuitability of the popular favorites. Their argument has morphed, however, from hyperventilation over Trump’s vulgarities and Sanders’ revolutionary fantasies into warnings that they can’t “win.” It’s almost — almost — enough to make me wish that the two surprise contenders would face off in the finals, making it a battle of losers, one of whom would then actually win. It would, at least, confound the morons who’ve mistaken the process of choosing the most powerful executive on earth for a national championship.

If coercion and aggression are everything, then only power matters. People who think like that will always belong to parties of power.

Would it lead them to see how silly the exercise has become? Perhaps it would, for some. For a great many others, it already has. Polls show Libertarian Party presidential frontrunner and former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson poised for an historic level of electoral support for that very reason. Johnson won’t win, but he’s changing the game — and persuading.

We need parties of persuasion to exist as civilized people. Politics isn’t going away, whether we like it or not, because for the foreseeable future, despite how much we hate the idea, government is here to stay. And power politics will exist as long as there is big and intrusive government. The twin Goliaths care about nothing but power, having long ago abandoned most pretenses of caring about persuasion. That’s where the Davids come in, and it’s why we’re necessary.

Even when they win, power-game voters almost never get what they want. They are merely being used as a means of keeping the Goliaths in charge. And this time, until the next time, once they have served their purpose they will be discarded and disregarded. If we explain this to them, some of them just may stop telling us what losers we are and begin to consider voting for more libertarian options.

The primary concept to get through to them, though, is the difference between power and persuasion. Which function do they want politics to serve? That is the decision that determines not only their own choices but the direction our country will take.

About this AuthorLori Heine is a freelance journalist and playwright from Goldwater country. Her work is most often seen in the LGBT Christian magazines Whosoever and The Epistle.

The Long Goodbye

On April 19, on the eve of his 90th birthday, Fidel Castro delivered his “farewell” address to the Cuban Communist Party Congress in Havana. Fidel’s farewells now rival Francisco Franco’s farewells — or notices of his departure from this world — in both length and credibility. Though he first temporarily stepped down as president of Cuba in 2006, and then retired permanently in 2008, Fidel Castro’s influence as his successor’s elder brother, his continuing physical presence, and his moral standing as the “conscience of the Revolution,” preclude any serious change in Cuba’s political system.

The good news is that something inside is whispering to him that his time on earth is done. As a consequence, he’s urging his successors to keep the faith. No one expects the country’s first vice president, Miguel Mario Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, 56, to succeed in any meaningful way. Though Raul Castro has said that he’d step down in 2018 when his term is up, his second-in-command, José Ramón Machado Ventura, 85, is expected to continue wielding power by leading the Party. So, Fidel: rest assured — for now.

Word on the street is more nuanced. Raul was head of the armed forces and security organs before becoming president. His G2 security apparatus is second only to the CIA and Mossad (forget the KGB according to Juan Reynaldo Sanchez, Fidel’s personal bodyguard of 17 years). As head of the Armed Forces, Raul designed and engineered the very first tourism joint ventures with foreign governments and firms, loosely following the model of the People’s Liberation Army in China, whose commercial interests are widespread. The effort helped Cuba overcome the difficulties of the Special Period imposed by the implosion of the Soviet Union.

The good news is that something inside is whispering to Fidel that his time on earth is done.

Raul and his late wife, Vilma Espin, have three daughters. One is married to a general whose public persona is so behind-the-scenes that my informant couldn’t recall his name. The general is not a politician and doesn’t wish to draw attention to himself. However, he is the architect of most of Cuba’s successful mid-to-large state enterprises. His military, family and commercial positions endow him with unrivaled power; power that in my informed informant’s opinion he will not easily give up, but will continue to wield behind the scenes.

In spite of the government’s efforts to encourage self-employment in its own passive-aggressive way, again — according to this informant — the state is terrified of mid-level independent enterprises gaining a foothold on the island. Disincentives, from limits on the number of employees to accelerated taxation schemes, abound.

On March 28, as a response to President Obama’s visit to Cuba, Fidel opined in an editorial in the official organ of Cuba’s Communist Party, Granma, that “we do not need the empire to give us anything.” This time, Fidel, rest unassured: one of the primary sources of foreign exchange in Cuba is family remittances, to the tune of $2.5 billion annually (2014 figures; probably more now). But rest even more unassuredly, Fidel, because some of the money indirectly comes from US taxpayers, i.e., the government.

Though my group knew my objective and knew that I wrote for Liberty, I warned them to stick to our formal purpose if asked, and mention nothing of my other intentions.

Here’s how it works: Cuban refugees are automatically granted asylum in the US and are provided with food stamps, heath care, and a stipend, i.e., welfare. Some of this is sent back to family in Cuba. With Cuban hustle, many refugees get jobs but continue to collect benefits. The remittances give a whole new definition to Cuba’s being a “welfare” state — in this case, one that’s dependent on the US dole. Cuban refugees who came to the US in times past recognize the problem and are urging the US government to change the automatic acceptance rule for Cubans and apply normal asylum procedures to present-day Cuban immigrants.

This past February, I contributed to the remittances motherlode.

On my recent trip to Cuba I was bringing a small laptop computer to a relative — allowed, but ordinarily subject to declaration and a 100% tariff, something that would make the laptop unaffordable. At Jose Marti airport, and before I crossed passport control, a clipboard-wielding functionary spotted my group of five and targeted us as an irregular group. We were coming legally from Miami, as opposed to illegally through Mexico or Canada, venues from which American tourists aren’t the subjects of much concern. Our US State Dept. category was “Educational.” We were in Cuba to assess the opportunities for running bicycle-based adventure education courses covering history, environment, anthropology, etc. However, my personal objective was research for a proposed book, a purpose that would raise much concern with the Cuban government, and a travel category that would have required a Cuban government minder to accompany and “help” me at my expense. Though my group knew my objective and knew that I wrote for Liberty (a quasi-journalistic position — another category the government is wary of and upon which they impose many requirements), I warned them to stick to our formal purpose if asked, and mention nothing of my other intentions.

The functionary walked up to one of our group and asked our purpose in coming to Cuba. My partner blithely and absent-mindedly said he was a writer. My wife, ever alert, rushed to the scene and corrected the impression, saying we were there for educational purposes. By now our whole group surrounded the man. He asked for our itinerary and formal proposal. I dazzled him with paperwork which I’d painstakingly composed with every computer tool available: detailed schedule, educational purpose of the trip, lengthy resumes of each participant along with their professional positions, and letters of support and intent from three universities.

The man (his English being only passable) glanced at the professionally printed matter and, satisfied, returned it to me. He then asked if we were carrying any electronic devices, cameras, computers, etc. reassuring us that these were permissible for personal use. Going round the circle, each participant pulled out camera, laptop, phone, whatever. By the time he got to me and I’d pulled out my camera and was about to declare the laptop for my relative, the man lost interest and dismissed us, figuring we were what we appeared to be.

I’d successfully taken a laptop into Cuba — one small ruse for a man; one satisfying step for liberty in Cuba.

About this Author

Robert H. Miller is a builder, outdoor adventure guide, and author of Kayaking the Inside Passage: A Paddler's Guide from Olympia, Washington to Muir Glacier, Alaska.

Alice in Merkeland

The Europeans, brainy people that they are, have always had a problem understanding the concept of liberty.

It’s one of the simplest concepts in the world. It means being left alone to do what you want. For Europeans, however — and, I regret to add, for many millions of Americans as well — it has always been the concept of doing what the state considers to be good. It didn’t take long for the French Revolution to define liberty as the freedom to destroy Catholicism. It didn’t take long for the German revolution of 1848 to define liberty as freedom for German nationalism. It didn’t take any time at all for the Weimar Republic to define liberty as the government’s taking money from the people and wasting it on social uplift projects.

Now comes Angela Merkel. First she decides, without consulting anyone, to force the German people — and if she had her way, all other Europeans — to liberate the Syrians by taking them in and supporting them all on welfare. Then, mirabile dictu, she discovers that way too many Syrians want to take that deal, and way too many Germans don’t. So to save her face, she decides to bundle up the Germans’ money — again, without anyone’s permission — and give it to Turkey, so that Turkey can keep the would-be immigrants from getting into Germany. Thus her open door policy becomes an invitation for the Syrians to come on in — to Turkey. And stay there, courtesy the Turkish government.

But again she discovers that actions may have consequences. The Turkish president, Recep T. Erdogan, an equally domineering personality, decides that he wants more out of the deal. He wants Merkel to shut up his critics — in Germany.

For Europeans, however — and for many millions of Americans as well — "liberty" has always been the concept of doing what the state considers to be good.

German TV aired a song satirizing Erdogan. Erdogan’s government demanded that the video be removed from access on the internet. A German comedian, or perhaps would-be comedian, then went on TV and recited a poem ridiculing Erdogan. Erdogan therefore demanded that the comedian be prosecuted under a law saying that you can be sent to jail for five years for insulting a foreign leader. There are plenty of laws in Europe decreeing that you can’t say or publish certain things; this is what Berlin, Vienna, Brussels, whatever, call liberty. Go figure. But while you’re figuring, Merkel has already authorized the prosecution.

You see, this screwy law not only threatens you with imprisonment if you say something that some foreign politician doesn’t like, but it leaves the power to decide on prosecution with your own politicians. So, if we had such a law, Obama would be authorizing pleas for someone to be prosecuted for satirizing Castro, and Cruz, or whoever the Republican president might be, would be authorizing pleas for prosecuting someone who satirized Netanyahu. Not only is it an authoritarian law, but it’s a politically arbitrary one.

The result, right now, is that the Erdoganish Turks are saying, as many Europeans always say under such circumstances, that “this has nothing to do with free speech”; Merkel’s supporters are saying that by authorizing the prosecution she is “standing up for the rule of law”; and she herself is saying that her action does not represent “a decision about the limits of freedom of art, the press, and opinion.” She further opines that “in a constitutional democracy, weighing up personal rights against freedom of the press and freedom of expression is not a matter for governments, but for public prosecutors and courts.”

It’s the old story. You have rights, granted. But these rights have to be “weighed” against other rights. You got your “personal rights,” see; but then, on the other hand, you got your “freedom of expression.” Entirely different! And somebody’s got to “weigh” them. So . . . let’s see here. I know! Let’s have the “public prosecutors and courts” do it. After all, they’re not the “government,” are they?

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

A Fun Day for Hillary

Maybe you have already witnessed these things, but on April 3 I finally saw videos of the end of Muammar Gaddafi and the rejoicing of Hillary Clinton about it.

The date is October 20, 2011. Gaddafi, deposed dictator of Libya, is being lynched by a mob of Muslim “militants.” He is crying and his face is covered with blood. One of his dirty and insane countrymen is overcome by the glory of tearing off Gaddafi’s shoe. It is evident that Gaddafi’s tortures will continue until he is dead.

Now for video no. 2. Clinton, Secretary of State of the United States, is sitting in a comfortable chair, surrounded by her aides and a television crew. She is being interviewed by a CBS reporter. She hears the news of Gaddafi’s death, under what circumstances she can well imagine. She jiggles and rolls her eyes like a high-school cheerleader and emits a parody of Julius Caesar: “We came, we saw, he died.” She laughs and preens.

The two sequences are peculiarly disturbing, tawdry, painful, vile.

What had happened?

Gaddafi, a violent eccentric, had ruled Libya for 42 years. At first an opponent of the West and a sponsor of terrorism, he later helped to repress our crazed Islamic enemies and made a good start at liberating his economy. His reward was to be set upon by rebels encouraged by the United States and its NATO allies, under the direction of President Obama and Hillary Clinton. Then, when the rebels demonstrated that they could not beat him, he was deposed by the “humanitarian assistance” granted to them by NATO, in the form of weapons supplies and bombing. The lynch mob that seized him was able to do so because his convoy of vehicles had been attacked from the air and disabled by NATO. Hence Mrs. Clinton’s pride in his death. It seems to have been her most valued achievement.

What was the result?

Libyans split into rival factions, much worse than before. Many of them went over to the forces of radical Islam. Some of those people mobbed the United States embassy and killed our ambassador, using weapons that the US had supplied. What was once the nation of Libya is now a scene of chronic civil war in which ISIS and other terrorists have found a congenial home. Libya’s neighbor, Egypt, was also the target of American intervention, which helped to install a government run by Islamic extremists who began a reign of terror against Christians and dissidents. Contrary to the mandate of the United States, the extremists were kicked out by other Egyptians. The Libyan mess remains, and to a large degree the Egyptian mess.

Hence Mrs. Clinton’s pride in Gaddafi's death. It seems to have been her most valued achievement.

The Obama administration’s involvement in these circumstances is still being investigated. Mrs. Clinton is still being investigated. Gaddafi is dead. The videos of his sickening death and her sickening laughter remain.

Here is a snapshot of our world, and of the Obama administration’s place in it. It’s a world of competing evils, in which the United States, for all the supposedly best reasons, chronically favors the worst. Obama, we hear, wanted to end US imperialism. He wanted to end America’s habit of dominating other countries for their own good. He wanted to end . . . all that. So, like Woodrow Wilson, or Bill Clinton, or George Bush, he meddled forcibly with other countries. Including Libya.

And you see what happened. You don’t need to have it explained to you. You see it.

About this Author

Stephen Cox is editor of Liberty, and a professor of literature at the University of California San Diego. His recent books include The Big House: Image and Reality of the American Prison and American Christianity: The Continuing Revolution. Newly published is Culture and Liberty, a selection of works by Isabel Paterson.

Ideas Have Consequences

It probably couldn’t be any worse. The current presidential candidates are about as bad as bad can be.

Just look at them.

Ted Cruz, who called a press conference to say that he would not “copulate” with a rat like Donald Trump.

Donald Trump, who had every opportunity to gather all anti-establishment voters into his fold but insisted, instead, on alienating as many as possible — e.g., stipulating that in some hypothetical world in which abortion was outlawed, women who had abortions should be “punished,” then putting out a press release saying that he didn’t really mean that, and then saying what he didn’t mean again.

Bernie Sanders, spouting non-facts 24/7.

Hillary Clinton — say no more.

The temptation is to attribute the horror of 2016 to the candidates’ abominable personalities, or at most to the failures of the electoral system, which is warmly responsive to televisable personalities (Trump), and to the indefatigable pressure groups that gave us Clinton and Sanders (and Jeb Bush and a few other sparklers).

I think that those factors are important, but they are as nothing when compared with the ideas that are insisted upon by the pressure groups and are projected so abominably by the personalities.

All the problems that are used to justify the literally insane campaigns now being waged were the direct results of unlimited government.

The ideas aren’t many. We’re not dealing with the intellectual intricacy of the questions that Lincoln and Douglas debated. Most of what passes for ideas in today’s campaigning results from a handful of crude, outdated assumptions, as follows:

1. The idea that work produces wealth, and therefore ought to be rewarded — an idea that had the stuffing knocked out of it by the discovery of the principle of marginal utility, a mere 14 decades ago.

2. The age-old idea that wealth should be apportioned by political means; i.e., by force.

These two ideas provide most of Bernie Sanders’ intellectual equipment, if you want to call it that.

3. The pre-1830s idea that free trade is bad for the economy.

Here you will recognize Donald Trump’s motivating idea, and one of Sanders’.

4. The 1970s idea that racial — and “racial” — sensitivities have rights that government must enforce.

This belief, which is merely the flipside of the much older belief that white racial sensitivities must be enforced by government, is the basis of the grievance industry which fuels both Sanders and Clinton, and without which their candidacies might not be able to exist.

5. The idea that, as H.L. Mencken said, “the people know what they want and deserve to get it, good and hard.”

This is populism, which fuels the preposterous windbaggery of Trump and Sanders, and to a degree that of Cruz. It was adequately discredited by the idiotic behavior of the ancient, direct democracies, if not of modern Detroit, Chicago, and New York City.

Now, you may say, and you would be right to say to it, these fallacious notions get a lot of their steam from the true, or sort of true, ideas that are associated with them. Sanders’ people and Trump’s people are right in believing that the financial system is rigged against the majority of Americans. Trump’s people and Cruz’s people are right in thinking that the country is being run into the ground by small groups of wealthy, or otherwise privileged, self-serving apostles of political correctness, seemingly bent on outraging all feelings but their own. Trump’s people are right in thinking that a welfare state cannot admit hordes of immigrants without grossly disadvantaging its own citizens. Clinton’s people are right in their visceral aversion to populism.

It’s remarkable that Clinton’s supporters, though undoubtedly the best “educated” of any of these groups, has the fewest ideas, right or wrong. It’s certainly a commentary on elite education.

But the most remarkable fact is that all the problems that are used to justify the literally insane campaigns now being waged were the direct results of unlimited government. If the American people had voted to increase income inequality, strangle the middle class, create racial tensions, ship jobs overseas, enlarge the permanent underclass, and grant a permanent veto power to an unelected class of well-paid parasites, they couldn’t have gotten better results from their decades of votes for people who wished to expand the government.

Now people of common sense and what used to be common knowledge are seeing (the cliché is unavoidable) the chickens coming home to roost. Are you happy? I’m not.

Unfair Competition from Robotland

This campaign season brings many complaints about “shipping jobs overseas.” Candidates promise to crack down on the offending corporations. American workers and the United States as a whole must compete on a slanted playing field against foreigners paid much below a dollar an hour. Moreover, the foreigners manipulate their currencies. They buy less from us than we from them, putting the US into a trade deficit (more exactly, a current-account deficit) costing us many billions of dollars a year. China, Japan, and Mexico count among the worst offenders. Free trade is fine, but only when it is fair.

In a similar but imaginary scenario, technology has advanced so far that “Robots” (in a stretched sense of the word) displace American workers at costs equivalent to Robot wages of 50 cents an hour. What is the difference between shipping jobs to Bangladesh and shipping jobs to Robotland? Well, Robotland does not have a balance of payments, so it cannot be accused of buying less from us than we from it, fleecing us of the difference. In the real world, automatic market mechanisms, if allowed to operate, forestall worrisome trade deficits and surpluses; and if the foreigners do make unbalanced sales to us, what can they do with the money? They acquire American bank accounts, securities, and properties, so supplying us with financial capital on advantageous terms.

What sense does the notion of one country competing with others have? Does it mean that international trade is a zero-sum game, with countries squabbling over shares in a fixed total of gains? On the contrary, international trade and advanced technology are alike in making desired goods more abundant. One country’s relatively low standard of living would trace to technological and entrepreneurial backwardness and perhaps to bad government. It would be absurd to blame its relative poverty on incompetent trade-policy negotiators.

One country’s relatively low standard of living would trace to technological and entrepreneurial backwardness and perhaps to bad government.

In the real world, conceivably, Robotland technology might displace many American workers, inviting Luddite arguments. I do not want to get into that issue here. I merely ask what the difference is between the scenarios of foreign competition and robots.

I wish that today’s vapid political debates could give way to ones with candidates testing one another’s policy-relevant understanding by posing questions like the one about robots. Other questions might be: How do your trade-policy proposals square with the principle of comparative advantage? What light might the absorption approach to balance-of-payments analysis shed on a connection between a trade deficit and a government budget deficit? In what sense is the Social Security trust fund a reassuring reality and in what sense a deceptive farce?

Unfortunately, such questions would not faze Donald Trump. He would respond with vicious personal insults and with reiterations of his own excellence. Anyway, allowing such questions could be entertaining. They might even enlighten some voters.

Poor Little Me

According to Madeleine Albright, I’m going to hell. As is every woman who isn’t voting for Hillary Clinton. All I can say is that heaven won’t be much of a paradise if it’s populated with the fools who are.

But if a lot of other self-proclaimed leftist smarties are right, I can’t go to hell, because I don’t even exist. After all, I’m a female libertarian. Further complicating matters is that now the progressive Left has decreed that gender does not exist. So not only am I going to hell (though I don’t exist because I’m a libertarian woman, and hell doesn’t exist because these people don’t believe in it), but I can’t be a woman because gender is nonexistent. Color me confused.

I don’t think I can even call myself a left-libertarian anymore. I want nothing whatsoever more to do with the Left. I’m glad that in 2016, a woman can run for president and be taken seriously, but the possibility that Hillary Clinton is not only running, but just might win, makes my blood run cold. I guess progressives still want me to be a woman so I can be a good little victim and vote for her. These people are so crazy, they make me want to run for my life.

If one out of every two people on the planet was helpless against the other, our species would have died out hundreds of thousands of years ago.

As a woman, I am expected, by the so-called progressives who have taken out a copyright on feminism, to sit around crying, “Poor little me!” I refuse to do that, not because I hate every woman in the world, or fail to care about our rights, but because I’m not an idiot. If I am not very much mistaken, we have been half of the human race since the Garden of Eden. Which means that over the millennia, we’ve had every bit as much to do with how things have turned out as men have. If we haven’t, then we’ve all been idiots.

According to the sort of history I’ve been taught since I was a girl, men have always been awful brutes — while women have been just sitting there and taking it. That doesn’t correspond to the history of my life, or the lives of most of the women I’ve ever known. I don’t even think that most of us could possibly believe it. If we were such ineffectual feathers in the wind, we’d never muster the will to get up in the morning.

My philosophy of politics and history is one in which every individual will has an influence on the whole. Events unfold as they do because of the interaction of multitudes. This was one of the aspects of libertarianism that attracted me from the start: everybody counts. The human drama is far too unruly to be centrally planned or collectively organized. If one out of every two people on the planet was helpless against the other, our species would have died out hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Certainly the rules by which we’ve played haven’t always been fair. It’s appalling to me that my grandmothers — each of whom had as much sense as any man I’ve ever met — couldn’t vote until 1920. But that arrangement was OK with most of the women in this country until it wasn’t anymore, after which it was changed. Women do as much to keep each other down (if not more) than men have ever done to oppress them.

What we dearly need is not an amendment to the Constitution, but an adjustment of attitude.

A crucial reason why women have lacked the power wielded by men is that men tend to be loyal to one another, and women do not. We compete with one another so fiercely and viciously that men shudder to think of it. They may kill each other in wars, but the rest of the time they manage to cooperate pretty nicely. We undermine and sabotage each other nearly every day of our lives from nursery school to nursing home.

Although I’m gay, I never liked playing with little girls when I was a kid. They made me nervous. One day they’d be friendly, the next they’d get mad — for no apparent reason — and the day after that, they’d be sugar and spice once again. I rarely trusted them. Most of my friends were boys, because they were temperamentally pretty much the same, day in and day out. I usually knew what to expect.

In my adult life, most of the really treacherous things ever done to me have been done by women. A lot of women have been kind and supportive, too, and it would be unfair for me to overlook them. But all along the way, I’ve benefitted from the support, encouragement, and mentorship of a variety of men. As has every other woman who has ever succeeded at much of anything in life — whether she’ll admit it or not.

I regard it as highly offensive when I’m informed that I should vote for Hillary Clinton because she’s a woman. It’s utter nonsense to suggest that this is any less sexist than the notion that a guy ought to vote for Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, or Bernie Sanders because they’re men. It will be “our turn” to be president when the majority of men and women determine that a female candidate is worthy of the office.

Women finally got the vote because enough women thought that every other woman deserved the franchise. When we get over the inferiority complex that tells us that men’s opinions of us carry more weight than our own of ourselves and one another, that’s when we’ll finally “achieve equality.” As long as we allow the political left to convince us that we’re helpless and victimized little nitwits, that’s exactly how we’ll behave. What we dearly need is not an amendment to the Constitution, but an adjustment of attitude. We’ve got vastly more power than we think.

About this AuthorLori Heine is a freelance journalist and playwright from Goldwater country. Her work is most often seen in the LGBT Christian magazines Whosoever and The Epistle.